Monday, June 18, 2018

I was in the shed a couple of months ago, and this was the view, below. Interesting. The table/chairs/gravel/trees were designed from another vantage point, from atop the deck, with zero relation to the shed.

Pic, above, shot from inside the shed, below.
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Speedy Double Axis views, above, no waiting a decade, or more.
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Seems an accident, but this is what I know about designing historic gardens, they are simple, yet historic garden design is playing 3-D chess, with the international champ. Simplicity of both pics, above, took every layer of my skills, fearlessly wielded.
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Fearless? My Garden Design must be deer proof, drought proof, bug/disease proof, little maintenance, gorgeous, maximum use alone & with groups, easy to manage when I turn 80, pair of trees for summer shade/winter sun, most importantly, NOW.
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Bought the variegated Boxwood, above, upon a whim over a decade ago, had never seen one before, expected it to die. Instead, thriving. Moving from my 30 year garden, 3 years ago this month, I only brought the few plants in large terra cotta pots, this variegated Boxwood included. Feels incredible having it back on the job. A dear friend, dignity returned.
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With Historic Garden Design, good surprises included.
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Garden & Be Well, XO T
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Wrote about creating this Garden Room, above, here.
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Double Axis? If you have a focal point, you must be able to stand at that focal point, turn 180, and shoot another focal point on that axis too.
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International Champ? Nature, of course.
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Cannot wait for my Kentucky garden friend to come visit, she understands the need to celebrate this surprise Double Axis appropriately, champagne. Perhaps you don't think it's a big event, just wait until it happens to you. Pop the cork.

Friday, April 13, 2018

Most notably, in the garden, below, is the hedge. Yet not the only notable element. At the front end of reading this post, make your list of reasons the hedge is a good idea. Perhaps your list is all negatives with the hedge, fine, make that mental list.
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At a point long past, in USA, the petite hedge lost favor, foundation plantings gained the upper hand. Ignoring centuries of Garden Design history.
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After WWII, USA had a building boom, and builders had a certificate of occupancy to gain before being able to sell their new homes. Landscaping was part of that package for the CO. A fact remaining in force.
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Pic, above, here.
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The style of a home's architecture does not influence whether or not to have a similar hedge, above.
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Subdivisions, city scapes, a home close to the road, are viable territory for a hedge, instead of a foundation planting.
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See the hedge, above? Now, go inside the hedge, go into the garden, go into the home, look toward the sidewalk and road.
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Gone. Sidewalk, road, cars, now blocked to your view, at a minimum diminished.
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More, depending on the height of your hedge, and ground elevations, a hedge will obliterate most views of cars passing by.
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Multi-tasking, a hedge hiding the view of cars, from your home, filters myriad toxins cars release from engine/tires. Did you know living at a busy road, with car/truck toxins spewing, is the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes/day?
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A hedge is also your starting point for a garden room. Paradise, in derivative, is a walled garden. Blocking the ogre of cars/traffic/toxins begins your sanctuary, with a hint of privacy. More, a layer of control, better, controlled by you.
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What do you want to do inside your hedge? A pair of benches inside the hedge, facing the house, focal points on axis, and a place to sit. Perhaps a pair of stone terraces either side of the front walk, the list is long on choices, your choices.
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A home, or neighborhood, with the garden design choice of front hedges, has increased property value. If an entire neighborhood is conceived with all homes having front hedges, it will be of greater value than a replica neighborhood without front hedges. Why? Good landscaping increases property values.
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Good landscaping also benefits health. More layers of a good garden design, around your home, has more of the bacteria for our body's microbiomes. Our bodies formed in synergy with Earth. Without the bacteria of Earth, inside our bodies, we die.
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What are your thoughts about a hedge in front of a home?
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Garden & Be Well, XO T

Friday, March 9, 2018

What do you 'see', below? For myself, I see a leveraged table. I place well leveraged tables/chairs throughout my garden. Each at a tipping point. Bottom of the steps leading into the garden from the house? A chair. Why?

Pic, above, here.
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The chair at the bottom of those steps, one of my best employees. Always ready to take away some of what I'm carrying, or to hand me something I must carry up the stairs.

Pic, above, here.
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Interesting, above, looking through various doors of Bunny Mellon's painted garden house. A conservatory, above, other doors leading into an allee.....
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Looking at the first pic, above, what do you see now? Hopefully a leveraged table, and if you don't have one/several, they're now on your list.
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Garden & Be Well, XO T

Thursday, March 1, 2018

Creating a Garden Design for an entire starter home subdivision is quite simple. Last week, I was in a neighborhood similar to, below.
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Built ca. late 1990's, the neighborhood ran into 2008. Little to nothing done with homes/neighborhood landscaping into 2018.
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Penny wise, dollar foolish.
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Why?
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With minimal thought, proper Garden Design thought, property values can be increased with each homeowner, fewer even, maybe 50% of homeowners, no, lower, 30% of homeowners, increasing property value for all the homes in the neighborhood. People believe what they see.
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How?
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Ask homeowners to plant 3 bushes. Away from the home preferably for little to no pruning, ever. For our zone, tall holly, tall juniper, magnolia.
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Pic, above, here.
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As those plants grow, they create beauty, natural habitat, and, most importantly, breaking of site lines between homes. Instead of a panorama of garages/drives, airconditioners, back patios/decks, etc. Now, the neighborhood is a Norman Rockwell painting in its setting. Properly matted & framed.
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But wait, there is more money, $$$, on the table, than mere property value.
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Already know where that money is?
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Real money. Monthly, into homeowner pockets. More, this money-into-pockets increases Earthly sustainability. Eco.

Pic, above, here.
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Siting those minimum 3 evergreen tall plants properly to block summer's sun, and winter's winds, decreases HVAC expense. 10% and higher. Do the math.
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Baking sun on a side of your home from 10am to sunset? You're saving real money.
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Take my Garden Design proposal a step further, and closer to your home, if you have sun issues, choose a deciduous tree to block summer sun, and let winter sun stream in.
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What's on the other side of those conifers, above? Perhaps the neighbor's deck with a John boat underneath.
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What is privacy worth to you? More, while creating the privacy, gaining beauty.
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Basic. Basic Garden Design.
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Greater, stewardship. No matter where you start, your own Garden Design or helping your neighborhood Garden Design, stewardship arrives in macro. What does that mean? Living amongst a proper Garden Design is about far more than money. Grace. Living a life in grace. Rich in resources. Resources as E.M. Forster spoke of resources in, Where Angels Fear to Tread. Joseph Campbell said, If you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. Pity anyone would accept that.
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Garden & Be Well, XOT

Thursday, February 22, 2018

During a time of life turbulence a quote appeared, without seeking, reading a magazine, It's Safe to Let Go.
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Wow, what a concept ! I'm not in charge. Instead of clinging to that fantasy, Let it go. Afraid to let go? Don't be, it's quite a flight. The ride of your life.
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Realizing it was said, too, in a movie, Out of Africa, "Let it go, this water belongs in Mombasa anyway."
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Moving away from that particular personal era of life, and into the land of green meatball foundation plantings. You must realize, they are connected. Literally connected. Have been hired by several women thru the years, not many, merely several wanting to get their landscapes to match their hearts.
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Amazingly, all of those women had a hedge at the front of their property. Hedges that I designed to open, Welcome, come in. More amazing, during those years, being hired by hedge women, never realized I was part of their tribe.
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First epiphany, for me, pull foundation plantings away from the house. Rather obvious, having studied historic gardens across Europe. Years, I had my hedge, without a gate, similar to, below.
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Happy, content, thriving, adored having that hedge moved, opened my home, gave breathing space, birds/butterflies more numerous. Finally, enough of filling the spiritual well, notice I created that fertile ground for myself, my well overflowed, epiphany arrived, put a gate into my hedge. Just as I had done for clients.
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Heads-up, none of this stuff works unless the epiphanies are your own, and you'll know. Not exactly burning-bush moments but you will have the knowledge downloaded into your heart/DNA, and understand. Still doubting, still unsure? No worries, it's safe to let go.

Playing with my front hedge at the street/curb, below. Adoring rustic, pastoral, my garden drips abundance, upon many layers.
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Pic, above, shot in my front garden.
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Looking at my front hedge, below, from inside.
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Pic, above, shot in my front bay window.
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Standing in my front yard, below, inside the gated hedge, looking into the same bay window from, above.
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Pic, above, shot looking into my front bay window.
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It does take a lot to get here. Where? Vanishing Threshold. What exactly does that entail? Knowing it's safe to let go. Your garden is not in your head. Your garden is in your heart. Waiting for you.
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About being safe to let go. You'll have the privilege of relearning it many times. Each time, more riches.
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It was good fortune, knowing to turn to my garden, letting go. Deeper than good fortune, an action going back centuries with many, each learning themselves, taking their own action steps of facing the fear, letting go, discovering the abundance of Providence.
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"In building this horticultural paradise, Tradescant presented nature as a book that man might read like the Bible. He understood the world in the same way as Johannes Kepler, the brilliant German mathematician and astronomer, who had described it as 'the very Book of Nature in which G*d as Creator has revealed and depicted His being and His Will with Man in a wordless tract'." Andrea Wulf & Emma Gieben-Gamal.
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Imagine my surprise, reading those words, above, last week. Letting go, too many times to count, tumbling into the best rabbit hole, ever.
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Garden & Be Well, XOT
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"Christopher Wren believed harmonious proportions came from mathematical laws underpinning Nature." Wulf & Gieben-Gamal.
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Until reading, This Other Eden, by Wulf & Gieben-Gamal, didn't realize Christopher Wren, architect, was Garden Designer also.
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Foundation plantings are a holy grail of USA landscaping. It's safe to let go. Do you realize what I found, moving my foundation plantings? What words would you use? What does your intuition tell you from reading this post? I know what I found. My life.

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Choosing pots for your garden, choose pots fabulous empty. Another aid in choosing a pot, ask yourself, "Is this pot so wonderful it will be fought over at my estate sale?"
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Within threads of choosing pots choose for color too.
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This pot, doesn't need to be planted, will look marvelous empty.
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Perhaps the pot planting, below, is a 10" plastic pot sold as a hanging basket, with the hanger clipped off.

Pic, above, here.
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Get your pots at the right height. Use a plinth, above.
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This pot is doing heavy lifting in the Garden Design realm. Did you notice already? More than merely a focal point for this photograph. This pot, above, is a focal point from more than a single direction.
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The more axis a focal point has, the better the focal point.
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See it, do it.
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Funny how much narrative the Garden Design realm performs. Seems so easy at the front end. Until someone points out your focal point needs a plinth, and multiple axis. In addition to that estate sale question.
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See it, do it? Easy? Requires that Johnny Cash bit, Meditate-on-it.
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Garden & Be Well, XOT

Thursday, October 5, 2017

Layers of narrative, below. At the front end of learning Garden Design professionally, mid-20's, this type of garden, below, equaled the type of home it fronted. At that front end, this garden was also too simple, too rigid, too formal, too boring, too lacking. Oh my what 3 decades have wrought.

Pic, above, here.
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Now I see the narrative of this garden as pure joy, wisdom and a proscenium for your life. Infinite scope for the imagination. Importantly, easy to maintain. No drama, your life, fully, enough.
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More, a Garden Design for any era, any architecture.
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"The best of life is life lived quietly where nothing happens but our calm journey thru' the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.-John McGahern".
Garden & Be Well, XO T
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We are back from 10 days in Maine with a bit of Boston. Portland, Freeport, Kennebunkport, Bar Harbor and more.
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One particular morning, staying at a B&B, still a private home built ca. 1880, on the shore in Bar Harbor, I arose early in excitement, knowing the coffee was awaiting, and exactly where I was going to sit and fully live. The owner was awake and about, and as I carried my coffee to the porch, an older gentleman, already sitting and fully living, with a great deep voice said, "Good morning." I replied in kind. We two continued our full living in the greatest of silence, that symphony of Nature and ocean.
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An hour passed, the owner came outside to ask if we were ok. The gentleman replied, "We are sharing a deep companionable silence." She left. We continued that deep companionable silence. A few minutes later Beloved arrived, soon breakfast would be served and the day had begun its new threads. "Take joy", Tasha Tudor signed off with. Yes, indeed.
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Early morning view, Bar Harbor, Shore Path Cottage.

Thursday, September 14, 2017

Perhaps not your cup of tea, below, but a perfect cup of tea nonetheless. Deer proof boxwood, evergreen, punctuated topiaried forms amongst the green meatballs. Low maintenance, drought proof, no bugs. Amusing, the slight stone dry stack retaining wall. Great thought went into needing/not needing it. We see which won.
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Trees lovingly pruned, small space, several rooms & hallways & walls.
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Huge invitation to enter with the pair of urns, graced with stone steps.
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Have a seat in the parlor, chairs/fence using black makes the small spaces 'larger'.
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House used wisely as the backdrop focal point. Incredible restraint with the house, great simplicity, dozens of choices made, each with the answer, 'No'. Modesty of the entire package, house & garden, displays a wise heart.

Pic, above, here.
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As time passes, above, I would prune the meatball hedges into simple hedges, no rounding, letting the rounded topiary shapes 'pop' more. Better than my thoughts, it would be more fun being friends with this gardener, above, and enjoying it unfold through their head/heart/hands.
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Great joy in getting the call from a gardening friend, "I'm going to move that hedge by the house, and put a gate in the fence near ......"
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Garden & Be Well, XO T
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Irma update. Hope it's the last. Power came on last nite, att phone service came on while we slept, over 3 days without. Beloved's team cleared, chain-sawed, raked, blew, etc. all yesterday. We're back to a new normal. Sunlight has changed with many large lost limbs, new scope for the imagination. A Georgia Power team & a Tennessee Power team got our power restored, we're on the main drive in the historic district. Side roads will get power today/tomorrow. They had greater storm damage.

Thursday, August 31, 2017

Macro: Islands in the gravel, no edges. Meandering flow, as if the gravel were water.
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Micro: Small space, high function, drifts of plantings make the space 'larger' axis views into beauty from the home.
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Crazy: Using green-meatballs and I like them.

Pic, above, here.
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Garden Design Class, above, in a single pic. Color echoes a delight, furniture choices/materials perfect.
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Garden & Be Well, XOT
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Thank you for continued calls, texts, emails about Harvey in Houston. Mom is dry, kept her power, worst damage are fronds from her palm trees fell. She said they needed pruning anyway. Many homes in her neighborhood flooded. Sister still evacuated, home is dry, and a scare this morning with new mandatory evacuations placed on her neighborhood. Put her address into the interactive map, she's 4 blocks away. Hundreds of homes already flooded in her neighborhood, ahead of this new mandatory evacuation. Keeping hope, she too stays dry. Prayers for all, people/pets/wildlife/livestock, affected by Harvey.

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

The list is long, all the things not taught about designing gardens. How do you know, what you don't know? You don't. What to do? Obvious. Start making your own list of Garden Design principles.
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I took this Garden Design Principle, below, early in my career. A completely arrogant swoop, yet a huge layer of Garden Design. Vanishing Threshold, my name for it.
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In the garden, designing your garden, the Garden Design process owns every view into your home. Are we looking, below, at the back of a TV? Not in my realm. Nor yours.
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Pic, above, here.

For information on purchasing the book—from bookstores or here online—please go to the webpage for Accounting for Taste.

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Babette's FeastA Fable for Culinary FrancePriscilla Parkhurst FergusonExcerpt from Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine

"Among the many films that center on food at the end of the twentieth century, Babette's Feast (Babettes Gaestebud) stands out for its reach and for the subtlety of its sensuality. For this film depicts far more than food and foodways; it shows more than the sensuality of food in our lives. Paradoxically, this Danish film tells an exemplary tale of French cuisine. Its portrayal of a French cook far from France evokes the French culinary landscape even more than the Danish countryside where it is set.
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Surely it is appropriate that the cinema supply the iconic culinary text of the twentieth century. Film captures, as a photograph cannot, the interactive process that culinary art requires. More immediately than print and like cuisine itself, film conveys a sensory awareness that embraces the viewer as the more intellectual medium cannot. Just as the written recipe can only suggest the sensory, so words inevitably fail to convey the comprehensive, all-enveloping sensuality of taste. The immediacy achieved by the moving narrative raises Babette's Feast to iconic status well above the short story by Isak Dinesen from which it is drawn. Through its exploitation of the sensory, the film transforms a "story from the human heart," as Dinesen puts it in the narrative frame of the original story, into an emblem of French culinary culture.
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Brought to the screen in 1987 by the Danish director Gabriel Axel, Babette's Feast arguably inaugurated what the past twenty-five years or so have consecrated as a veritable cinematic genre—the food film. From the exuberantly sexual foreplay of the couple devouring a turkey leg in Tom Jones (1963) to the Taiwanese Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) and the fluffy paean to the senses, Chocolat (2000), with many films in between, the food film has become a staple in the cinematic larder, another sign of the salience of food in the larger culture today. We all have our favorite from this lengthy roster. Indeed, based on the sheer number of food films, it would seem that just about every group that lays claim to a cuisine now has a film to tell the world about it.Babette's Feast shares many characteristics with other food films. First and foremost, it lovingly details the many pleasures of food, though unlike many others it does not equate the sensory with the sexual. More than others, however, and conspicuously more than Isak Dinesen's short story, it celebrates the senses. It invests cuisine—very pointedly French cuisine—with incomparable transformative powers. The spectacular repast that crowns the film conjures up a vision of spiritual well-being created by the transcendent artistry of a chef who sacrifices all for her art and, through that art, recreates her country. This restitution of place and resurrection of time makes the most powerful case yet for the intimate drama of culinary metamorphosis.

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Babette's Feast takes place in a remote seaside village in Jutland, the site of an especially strict Lutheran sect. The beautiful young daughters of the founder of the sect renounce suitors from the outside world who would have taken them away from their father, their village, and their religion. Martine (named for Martin Luther) rejects an aristocratic, worldly army officer, and Philippa (named for Luther's friend Phillip Melancton) turns down the offer of Achille Papin, a visiting French opera star, to sing in Paris, where he promises to make her a star. Years pass; neither sister marries. The two devote their lives to good works and keeping their now-dead father's spirit alive.
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One evening some thirty-five years later, in September 1871, in the midst of a driving rainstorm, a bedraggled and visibly exhausted woman appears on the doorstep of the two sisters, who are now in late middle age. The stranger bears a letter of introduction from Achille Papin, who remembers his idyll in rural Denmark as a very special, because so very different, time and place in his life. He asks the sisters to take in the woman, a refugee from the civil war raging in Paris in which her husband and son were both brutally killed "like rats." She herself, his letters informs them, barely escaped with her life. Babette Hersant has lost her family, her country, her language, and, as it turns out, her art. She is beaten, desolate, and desperate to be taken in.
Such is the simplicity of the sisters' life that they scarcely know what to do with a servant, even one who will work for no wages. Nevertheless, they take her in, and Babette—played by the luminous Stïphane Audran—soon becomes indispensable to them and to those whom they succor. The slight but significant touches that she brings to the daily fare make the food more palatable—and even, in a term that seems foreign to this strict Protestant sect, pleasurable. Babette insists on the quality of foodstuffs as she bargains in rudimentary but effective Danish with the grocer and the fishmonger, both of whom she astounds with her insistence on superior vegetables and absolutely fresh fish. It is clear that no one else gives such care to the quality of material ingredients or makes use of the herbs that she gathers in the fields overlooking the sea and hangs in her kitchen.
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When Babette leaves for a time and the sisters return to their task of dispensing their own unappetizingly brown ale-bread soup to the poor, one old man testily throws his spoon down when served the meal that had been perfectly acceptable before Babette's arrival. Once good taste is learned, there is no return. Another ends his prayers with thanks to God for sending Babette. The sisters sense rather than actually know that food tastes better, although they know for sure that their financial state has greatly improved since this foreigner came to them. Into this world disdainful of earthly delights, Babette subtly presses claims for the life around us. In a telling aesthetic gesture that sets her apart from the rest of the villagers, she washes the windows of the cottage to let the light and beauty of the outside world into the dark interior.
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Fourteen years pass. The sisters make plans to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of their father's birth. This celebration comes at a crucial moment: like many other sects after the loss of a charismatic founder, the disciples have fallen to squabbling and backbiting. The sisters hope that the simple repast that they envision will make whole what time and travail have sundered and thus will restore the spiritual harmony of their early church. At this point, Babette receives a letter from France with the news that she has won ten thousand francs in the state lottery. A child of misfortune, she has quite suddenly been made fortunate. After much thought, she requests permission to prepare the commemorative feast for the sisters and the community of believers, but she wants to do so on her own terms, as a "real French dinner." She also insists on paying for it. The sisters reluctantly grant her request. They assume that this will be the last meal she will make for them before she returns to France a rich woman. After a journey to marshal supplies that she has ordered from France, Babette returns at the head of a great procession of foodstuffs, including gleaming candelabra and silverware, elegant china and table linens, cases of wine, a calf's head, several quails in a cage, and an enormous live turtle that gives Martine nightmares.
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Horrified at what they fear will turn into a "witches' Sabbath," the sisters warn the community, begging forgiveness in advance. Like the early Christian martyrs, they determine to meet the presence of evil with resignation, in silence, with their minds on heaven, not earth. No one will think about the food. "It will be as if we never had the sense of taste," says one of the disciples. The sisters' apprehension only increases as Babette sets about preparing the meal. "Surely that isn't wine?" Martine asks in fear and trembling. "No, that isn't 'wine,'" Babette replies indignantly. "It's Clos de Vougeot 1845," the strange name only enhancing Martine and Philippa's sense of foreboding. With the help of a young boy engaged for the occasion, Babette slaughters, cooks, sifts, bakes, stirs, irons, polishes, burnishes. The dinner brings an unexpected guest, Lorens Loewenhielm, the army officer and suitor of Martine from years before, who is now a general. As before, he is visiting his aunt nearby and will accompany her to the celebratory dinner.
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The general is an essential figure for the culinary narrative, because he knows, as the others do not, what he is eating. The bubbly drink that one disciple reckons a kind of lemonade, he recognizes as a Veuve Cliquot 1860. More and more astounded as the meal proceeds, Loewenhielm comes to the realization that the only place that could have produced such a repast was the renowned Cafï Anglais in Paris whose signature dishes included the very "entombed quail" (cailles en sarcophage) that they are now consuming. As a young man posted to Paris, he had been honored at a memorable dinner at the very place. In the course of that dinner, his host, General Galliffet, recounted the surprising story of the extraordinary chef of this superb restaurant who, "quite exceptionally," was a woman. This incomparable chef had the great gift of transforming a dinner into "a kind of love affair" that "made no distinction between bodily appetite and spiritual appetite." The entombed quail were her invention.
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General Loewenhielm never seeks to learn how this dish, which he determines to be absolutely authentic, has appeared in such an unlikely venue. Under the circumstances, his silence is appropriate: explanation is neither necessary nor significant. Like the other guests, Loewenhielm accepts this manna from heaven as a sign of grace to be received without question and with boundless gratitude. The twelve at table, with Babette in the kitchen preparing the transformative red wine and bread, make this pointedly a last supper. Even the quail in their tombs suit a dinner where death is so present. The guests are themselves very elderly, and their thoughts turn frequently to the fate that awaits them in the hereafter, the punishments that will be meted out for past sins. The hymn that Philippa sings after dinner poignantly invokes the end of life, when all will be reconciled: "The sand in our hourglass will soon run out / The day is conquered by the night / The glories of the world are ending / So brief their day, so swift their flight / God, let thy brightness ever shine / Admit us to Thy mercy divine."
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Unmistakably, that reconciliation has already occurred around the dinner table, where Babette has indeed worked magic. Her feast has renewed friendships, restored love, and revived the harmony of the community. No one, in the end, can ignore the transcendent power of taste correctly rendered. General Loewenhielm comes to the realization that "in this beautiful world of ours, all things are possible." The other guests become just tipsy enough to open themselves, quite against their will, to the wonder of the material world and to corporeal pleasure. One guest rejects the water that is served late in the dinner, reaching avidly instead for the wine that she first tasted with such visible foreboding. Smiles on the erstwhile dour faces translate an inner well-being, the contentment of simply being. Poignantly, the departing congregants join hands to sing one final hymn as they dance in a circle under the stars in a crystal clear sky: "The clock strikes and time goes by: / Eternity is nigh. / Let us use this time to try / To serve the Lord with heart and mind. / So that our true home we shall find. / So that our true home we shall find." It is, after all, the Christmas season, and the birth of their founder on December 15th precedes by only a few days the birth of their Savior.
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Babette remains in the kitchen during the entire dinner. The serving boy moves between the dining room and the kitchen as he follows Babette's careful instructions about what and how much to serve whom in which glass. The camera cuts back and forth between these two rooms, dwelling lovingly on close-ups of the dishes being prepared and being served, the wine poured and sipped. In other words, the cinematic observer sees everything in the harmony of production and consumption. Babette is joined in the kitchen by one guest, the general's coach driver, to whom she serves every dish. In an addition that is at once authentic and comic, his frequently voiced response—"that's good"—expresses the deep satisfaction that the vow of silence will not allow the other guests to express. Only toward the end of the meal does Babette allow herself to savor the magnificent old burgundy that she has dispensed so prodigally. Only at the very end does she eat the incomparable meal that she has prepared (even then she remains standing). When the guests leave, Martine and Philippa come to the kitchen to compliment her on the meal and prepare to say good-bye. Babette quietly reveals that she was the head chef at the Cafï Anglais to whose artistry the general paid such eloquent testimony.
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She also stuns her employers in another way: she will not return to France—ever. There is no place for her there; everyone dear to her has died, the world she knew has disappeared. Besides, she has no money. The sisters are dumbfounded to learn that Babette spent her entire lottery winnings on the dinner—just what a dinner for twelve would cost at the Cafï Anglais, she states matter-of-factly. The sisters are taken aback at her sacrifice. "It was not just for you," Babette responds. She has proven her powers, performed her art. She has made her guests happy just as she had at the Cafï Anglais. "That's what Papin knew"—an artist himself, the opera singer recognized their kinship, their common pursuit of artistic excellence, their fulfillment in bringing pleasure. She subscribes to Papin's pronouncement that "Throughout the world sounds one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me the chance to do my very best." Babette has had a last chance to give of her very best, so that, contrary to what Martine fears, she cannot be poor: "an artist is never poor." For the first time, Philippa embraces her servant in an act of love that at once acknowledges the claims of the artist and her right to sacrifice. Babette will reap one final reward. In this film that balances visions of the hereafter with sights of the here and now, Philippa, the other artist as singer, admits Babette to the paradise of the righteous. Though a Catholic—Papist, in the sisters' lexicon—Babette will dwell in the New Jerusalem promised in the opening hymn and toward which the disciples yearn. In heaven, with its promised meeting of righteousness and bliss, Babette's art will "delight the angels!" Echoing the words that Achille Papin had written to her fourteen years before, Philippa assures Babette that in heaven she will be the artist God meant her to be.
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Not surprisingly, the commentary that Babette's Feast has occasioned sets those who are interested in the food against those who engage the religious dimensions of the film. Among the former, beginning with the Copenhagen restaurateur who supervised the presentation of food in the film, we can count the cooks who set out to turn the fabled repast into a real dinner. One of the most prominent French gastronomic critics criticized the film on just this score, condemning the pretentiousness of the feast and the egregious historical error of making a woman head chef in a restaurant such as the Cafï Anglais. Academic commentary, on the other hand, has delved into the religious interpretation, a topic on which French film critics seem to have had little to say. Perhaps the pietistic Lutheranism of the film is as alien for the largely Catholic French as Babette's cuisine was for her Lutheran guests. No one, however, not even the foodies who have made Babette's Feast a cult film, has seriously explored the film as a paradigm for French cuisine, and specifically what that cuisine stands for in the late twentieth century. For it is not the single repast, however glorious, that speaks to French cuisine today; rather, it is that meal within the larger conception of food and the proper relations in the culinary contract that ties cook to producers and to consumers. "I made them happy," Babette says with pride. That happiness is the accomplishment of great art and of great love, of the material with which the artist works, and of the public that she serves.
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Its everydayness sets the culinary apart from other arts. Cuisine is a practice of everyday life, to invoke Michel de Certeau a last time—or even better, as the French title of his book has it, cuisine is an art of "making do" (les arts de faire). Babette is an artist of the everyday, but one who also, when given the opportunity, moves in the more exalted public circles of the spectacular. More obviously humble, the cook works with what is available; the spectacular appears in the parallel transformation wrought by the great artist-chef. This dialectic of everyday life confronting extraordinary spectacle plays out in so many circumstances and assumes so many guises as to be constitutive of French cuisine. The connection between the everyday and the spectacular also controls the continuum between cooking and chefing. The culinary roles of cook and chef imperfectly coincide with the status designations of cook and chef. Thought to be acook and actually the cook for thirteen years, Babette reveals herself to be a great chef. Just as clearly, her "chefing" depends on the cooking that also informs the everyday life of the community.
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That Dinesen defied historical accuracy to promote a woman to the official, public status of chef has, I think, to do with a desire to emphasize the connection between culinary extremes. Haute cuisine and everyday cooking lie at different ends of the same continuum. Babette's Feast makes the same point about music. The hymns that provide most of the music in the film articulate and express the faith of the community, just as the duet from Mozart's Don Giovanni that Achille Papin teaches Philippa signifies her situation with him. The seductiveness of the music reinforces the scene of seduction that Papin and Philippa perform and then begin to experience. Philippa, apparently fearful of her growing involvement with Papin, chooses to discontinue her lessons. She refuses a life on the stage, as Babette chooses not to return to France. Yet like Babette, Philippa, Papin's "beautiful soprano of the snows," continues to illuminate the humbler setting. The wonderful, immensely satisfying world of music includes hymns as well as Mozart. Papin is sure that he will hear Philippa's voice in paradise. Both women use their gift in lesser settings to make people happy, to express joy, to illuminate everyday life. It is then altogether fitting that Philippa should be the one to pay homage to Babette as an artist, repeating to Babette the very words that Papin had written her so many years before.
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A second article of faith in Babette's Feast is the certainty of the instantaneous and direct power of art. Like grace, like the mercy invoked by the pastor early in the film and the general at the end, art touches individuals of every station, even against their will. Surely it is not stretching things too far to see this story as Dinesen's contribution to the debate over mass culture that was raging in the 1950s when she wrote "Babette's Feast." Against the contemnors of so-called mass society, the film, like Dinesen's short story, proposes an overwhelmingly optimistic, consistently elevated view of art, artists, and society. Against virtually all that we know about the socialization of taste—just ask anyone who has urged a child to try something new—Babette's Feast affirms the immediate accessibility of new and strange foods. The artist creates for the untutored no less than for the connoisseur. The young Philippa, Papin promises, will sing for the emperor but also for the young working girls from the poor neighborhoods. The general articulates his pleasure; his coachman in the kitchen says no more than "that's good," while the others say nothing at all. If the first appreciation is the more knowledgeable, the transformation of the silent diners offers the more eloquent testimony to the power of culinary art.
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So, too, the viewers of the film do not need to have experienced "a real French dinner" to fall under the spell of the feast that Babette prepares. Nor do we need to recognize the hymns or identify the works by Mozart and Rossini to be moved by the music and to grasp its significance for the film. These two performing arts, music and cuisine, speak to the senses directly; their effect is all in the moment. Critical appreciation enhances the experience by increasing understanding, but the senses make the primal connection. The film works so well because it joins taste (food) and hearing (music) to the conforming and informing power of sight. Each becomes greater in the presence of the others—much as a fine meal requires companionship and presentation as well as perfect consumption.
.Babette's Feast illuminates the connection between culinary production and the act of consumption. Not only is each a function of the other, neither can be conceived without the other. The truism that links production and consumption aside—food exists to be consumed—works about food and about cuisine, like works throughout literary and cinematic history, tend to focus on the one at the expense of the other. Notably, this film appeared as adventurous chefs were capturing the attention of the media in France and abroad. Babette's promotion, or, better yet, her elevation, is appropriate in an increasingly international food culture. To be sure, this feast is Babette's, the Christ figure who sacrifices for the spiritual good and material contentment of the community. Nevertheless, and like the Last Supper on which it is loosely modeled, this feast is all about public participation. Cuisine, this film tells us as it continually cuts back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, is a social relationship.

II.

The incongruity of Babette's cuisine in isolated Jutland is dramatized in this film of many distances. The Danish director worked with a short story set in Norway written in English by a Danish author. Jutland itself is distant from any world that we know. It exists in a world unto itself out of historical time. Yet the concerns of the villagers—to live a righteous life, to dedicate the self to God—are eternal and timeless. Drama enters this self-contained community when outsiders intrude, however momentarily. The aristocratic army officer from the Danish court who has spent time in Paris, the French opera singer, and Babette, the French refugee, insert this tale into history, mark it as a modern fable, and, most important, connect it to the larger world of politics and of art. These outsiders situate the film not vaguely, in a nineteenth century that differs little from the seventeenth, but in the midst of a century wracked by social, economic, and political change. The politics that the film barely hints at—as we shall see, Dinesen's text is much more explicit—make Babette's Feast also a tale of France. In addition, if the political resonance is muted, the artistic context is very much present, through the opera singer from Paris and most of all through Babette's accomplishment in French cuisine.
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In contrast with the timelessness of the religious community, the French chronology is remarkably precise. Babette arrives in September 1871. In his letter of introduction, Papin recalls that he had been in Jutland thirty-five years previously, that is, in 1836. Assuming that the sisters were born in the 1820s, they would be in their mid-sixties when Babette makes her festive meal fourteen years after her arrival, thus in 1885. Although thirty-five years places the younger Papin's previous stay in Jutland during the July Monarchy (1830-48), the period that he evokes so lovingly, the era that acclaimed his art, is the Second Empire (1852-70). The regime of Napoleon III went down in humiliating defeat to the Prussians in 1870 and set the scene for the Commune of 1871 that the Third Republic (1870-1940) repressed so cruelly, forcing Babette to flee.
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Like Papin's beloved empress, Babette will spend the rest of her life in exile. Her past is the Commune as well as the Cafï Anglais, the brutality of repression as much as the opulence of gastronomy. Her husband and son were executed. She can count herself fortunate to have gotten out of the country alive. She has lost everything except her art. The contemporary engraving shown briefly during Martine's reading of Papin's letter of introduction shows a firing squad at work. (Estimates of the number killed during this period range from 20,000 to 25,000.) The irony of Babette's situation becomes even greater when we realize that the man who proclaimed that the chef at the Cafï Anglais was the only woman worth fighting a duel for—in General Loewenhielm's narrative of his dinner at the Cafï Anglais—was General Galliffet, the man known in leftist circles as the "butcher of the Commune" because of his capricious brutality in executing Communards.
.Babette's Feast holds the viewer with the beauty of the here and now and especially with the pleasures of the flesh. It speaks to the senses. Sight and sound supplement the gustatory, for which, in the event, they necessarily substitute. We cannot taste the feast that Babette prepares and her guests consume. Yet though we cannot be moved directly by the foods as they are, we are seduced vicariously, through the vision and the music with which the film envelops the viewer. This focus on the sensual joys of the present defines the film and, I dare say, has everything to do with its original popularity and its subsequent cult status. Just how distinctive a feature this appeal to the sensory is in the film emerges from a comparison with Dinesen's story. At first glance a faithful rendering of the story, the film in fact diverges significantly from the original text. Its lessons differ, and the means of instruction differ as well. Gabriel Axel's film, quite unlike Dinesen's narrative, is a fable for the French, an iconic projection of and for French culinary culture. That Axel is not French only renders the homage to French cuisine all the more striking, all the more worthy of our notice. Its very foreignness allows Babette's Feast the greater testimony to the prestige that continues to accrue to French cuisine abroad as well as at home.
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Distinct emphases appear on every level of the film, beginning with chronology. In contrast with the short story on which it is based, Babette's Feast ages the sisters by fifteen years or so, so that they are in their late forties when Babette arrives and in their mid-sixties for the final feast, not, as Dinesen's chronology would have them, in their mid-thirties and late forties respectively. The advanced age of the sisters; the greater expanse of time separating youthful visions and hopes from trials and disappointments in the present; the visibly aged faces; Babette's spending fourteen with the sisters before winning the lottery, not twelve; the presence of death and concern with the hereafter—all reinforce the elegiac quality of the film. The overpowering idea of life ending, the impulse to meditate on one's life course and the choices one has made, the anxious contemplation of the future—render the euphoria produced by the meal more dramatic, the prospect of rejuvenation more entrancing.
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If Dinesen's disciples and even General Loewenhielm appear somewhat foolish, her Babette is both mysterious and forceful. When Philippa reproaches Babette for giving away everything she had for their sake, Axel's Babette rectifies quietly and rather sadly, "It was not just for you." In reply to Martine's assertion that she will be poor henceforth, she observes simply, "an artist is never poor." By contrast, Dinesen dwells at length on the same sequence, which is both longer and stronger than in the film. Babette gives a look of perhaps "pity, even scorn," and replies categorically to Martine, "For your sake?…No. For my own." Then, not as a reply but as a claim to distinction, she twice declares, "I am a great artist." Appearances notwithstanding, she will never be poor: "A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor. We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing." Thus, Dinesen depicts a forcefully assertive artist who proclaims her rights, affirms her superiority, and underscores her distinction from the sisters and, indeed, from their entire world. Artists, Dinesen impresses upon us, are a breed apart. The common humanity of which the film makes so much figures minimally in the short story.
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The assertiveness of Dinesen's Babette suits a brooding, passionate figure whose unplumbed depths frighten the fearful sisters and whose artistic persona is of a piece with her political personage. In fact, Dinesen makes much more of the political context than does the film. Her Babette comes not simply as a refugee from a civil war in which her husband and son were killed, but as herself an active participant in that war. Papin's letter introduces Babette as a Communard. Arrested as a Pïtroleuse—the term used, Papin explains, for women who used petroleum to set fire to houses—she has "narrowly escaped the blood-stained hands of General Galliffet." The narrowness of her escape is even clearer if we recollect that the French army crushed the Commune at the end of May 1871. Babette arrives at the sisters' cottage the very next month, "haggard and wild-eyed like a hunted animal." Soon she was "held in awe" by them because of her bargaining prowess in the marketplace. For the disciples, she appeared "the dark Martha in the house of their two fair Marys." Speaking little of their language, she would sit brooding silently, "her dark eyes wide open, as enigmatical and fatal as a Pythia upon her tripod." Not surprisingly with such a comparison, the sisters are terrified by the notion that their trusted servant had been an incendiary.
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Finally, Dinesen dwells at length upon the cosmic irony of Babette's serving a man who had dined with the very General Galliffet who was responsible for the deaths of her son and husband. The irony is all the greater given the reason that Babette did not return to Paris. All those whom she had served at the Cafï Anglais, the elite whom she battled so fiercely on the barricades of the Commune and whose names she gives, were gone. However cruel, however oppressive, "those people belonged to me, they were mine," because they alone had the understanding to appreciate what a great artist she was. Less than that will not do. She cites Papin: "it is terrible and unbearable to an artist to be encouraged to do, to be applauded for doing, his second best." She will not return to a world that will reward the also-ran. This is the "perspective of tragedy" that so moves the sisters, a tragedy that they sense without understanding. Until she tells them, the sisters have no idea of Babette's art. They can remember none of the dishes that they had eaten. They are most certainly not the ideal public that Babette craves.
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Gabriel Axel's film softens Babette considerably, largely by muting her politics and assertiveness while strengthening her portrayal as artist. No mention is made of her past as a Pïtroleuse, and since she arrives in Jutland in September, not June, Babette is more distanced from the bloody events of the Commune. General Galliffet's name is mentioned only once, by General Loewenhielm at dinner, and only in reference to his role as a consummate gastronome. (That Dinesen explains his role in the suppression of the Commune undoubtedly speaks to a sense that few readers would have any notion of General Galliffet.) The irony of Babette's serving Loewenhielm, who once dined with Galliffet, comes only in retrospect and with knowledge that the film does not give. Nor does she list the people who "belonged" to her, describe the world that has disappeared, or say anything about the insufferableness of doing one's second best. Because the film makes us privy to the power of her art, Axel's more self-effacing Babette has no need to tell us how great she is, for we see it. We see for ourselves the transformations that her feast has wrought: the faces illumined, the hearts transformed, the rancor buried, the good fellowship restored, the jubilation and the joy. Above all, this Babette is an artist who communicates with her public, however humble that public may be. She is, in a word, a culinary artist at her best.
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Although we cannot actually taste Babette's feast, the film works to convey taste by proxy. In contrast with Dinesen, who details very little about the dishes themselves, no doubt wishing to avoid the pitfalls inherent in gastronomic overwriting, Axel suggests the sensuous pleasures of the gustatory through the equally sensuous enjoyment of sight and sound. The hymns that are sung throughout the film, the duet from Don Giovanni, the piano played by Philippa on different occasions—the music exercises a seduction all its own. The purity of sound draws us along just as Philippa's voice drew Papin to church. By another route, visuals bring the viewer into the universe of the film. The multiple grays, the washed-out blues of the sea and the sky, and blacks dominate the narrative until the feast bursts forth with its brilliant and dramatic colors, the general's resplendent uniform and, most of all, the meal itself: the red of the wine, the deep purple of the ripe figs, the golden pineapple, the copper utensils in the kitchen, the gleaming silver, china, and glassware on the table. It is again fitting that the film alters General Loewenhielm's conclusion, which comes as something of a benediction after his experience of grace at the feast. The realization that Dinesen gives him, that "in this world anything is possible," Axel amends simply but significantly to "in this beautiful world of ours, all things are possible." The beauty of this world here and now is to be seen and experienced by all of us. We do ourselves, and God, a disservice when we fail to take pleasure in the beauty that surrounds us. For this beauty dissolves conflict by putting us in touch with another, better world, a world that knows neither acrimony nor animosity.
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Just as the meal in the film effaces the discord among the disciples, so, too, Babette's Feast uses the senses to illuminate and transcend the everyday. The film mutes the political because it takes us beyond conflict. We see not only the effects of consumption but also, and most importantly for my fable of French cuisine, the care of preparation. Babette's Feast is a food film because it follows the meal from beginning to end, from the trip to procure foodstuffs through the multiple activities of cooking and serving and the pleasures of dining. Consistent with the emphasis on the construction of beauty, the film glosses over the less appealing, destructive aspects of preparation. There is no hint of how the turtle actually ends up as soup. The closest we come to slaughter is a shot of the quail carcasses in a basket being taken to the garbage. Instead, the film focuses on preparation. The camera closes in on Babette's hands as she cuts the rounds of puff pastry dough, adds caviar and crème fra²che to the blinis, stuffs the quail with foie gras, and assembles it, with the head in place, on its pastry coffin. Walnuts are added to the endive salad, big rounds of hard cheese are cut into serving portions; the Nesselrode pudding is finished with whipped cream, glazed chestnuts, and chocolate sauce. We are almost at table level as each wine is poured into glasses that sparkle like a stained-glass window on a sunny day.
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Axel's Babette's Feast shows us that cuisine is not simply the final product put on the table. The process of preparation that the film follows in loving detail makes it abundantly clear that cuisine operates within a vital web of social relations anchored by the cook. Reaching backwards in the culinary sequence to farmers and fishermen, both near and far, Babette's glorious dinner offers a striking illustration of the internationalization of food. Her insistence upon French products for a "real French dinner" makes "frenchification" the absolutely appropriate term. Then there are the men who transport the goods, the young boy who helps in the kitchen and waits on table (and, as in real life, those who clean up)—all the intermediaries who connect production and consumption. Then, and only then, do we encounter the diners at the far end of the culinary chain. Even though Babette remains out of sight in the kitchen, emerging to begin clearing the table only after the guests have departed, the camera cutting back and forth between kitchen and table calls attention to the connections between cook and consumer. The conversations that Babette overhears from the kitchen tell her that the meal is working its magic. Ultimately, the dramas of cooking frame the drama of dining: the end lies in the beginning just as the beginning implies the end. The theological reverberation of this statement is, of course, especially appropriate for a film that makes so much of beginnings and endings.

III.

By any criterion, Babette's Feast is a food film. More than that, it is a French food film, a film of French food, "a real French dinner" presented in amorous particulars. Still more than that, this is a French food film by virtue of the eating order that it represents and proposes for our delight, and that eating order is unequivocally French. Like Proust's Recherche, Babette's Feastresurrects a country that is no more, the France before 1870 that had already disappeared when Babette arrived in Jutland in 1871, was even more obscure when the tale was written in 1952, and had become positively prehistoric by 1987, when the film appeared. Culinary France is an ideal, and France is an idealized country that lives through its cuisine. Babette's Feast constructs something of a legend out of French cuisine, a narrative lived between history and myth, in that such cuisine restores the community of the faithful and resurrects a country.
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The very distance of the film from France, its foreign author and filmmaker, language and setting, heightens our awareness of the constructed nature of the country that is culinary France.
A glorious banquet allows Babette to give of her very best in her exile from France. It allows her to realize her artistic gift, and to make her public supremely, ineffably happy in a joy that seamlessly merges the spiritual and the corporeal. It also permits her to recall the country that she will never see again. The very names of the foods bring forth the land and its culinary art. From the wines, whose quality is guaranteed by a very particular wine seller in Paris (Chez Philippe, rue Montorgueil), to the quail, these foodstuffs are as talismanic as Proust's madeleine and as memorable. The gesture of reconstruction goes back in literature at least to Virgil's Andromache, Hector's widow whom Odysseus finds in a Trojan landscape that she has constructed in the Greece that holds her captive. Similarly, Babette conjures up the France that she knew and loved, the Paris of the Cafï Anglais whose patrons acclaimed her as "the greatest culinary genius." Her exile is all the more poignant because, like Andromache, she cannot go home again. As she tells the sisters, the France that she knew is no more. She brought it into existence once again if only for a moment—the utopian moment of her feast based on the stunning good fortune of winning the lottery.
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As the madeleine dipped in a cup of tea gives inexpressible joy to Proust's narrator by resurrecting his childhood, so Babette's feast carries her and her guests to another, better world. We who watch this feast may also count ourselves among Babette's guests. It is not so much a lost France that the film offers the contemporary viewer as an idealized France that is called into existence by its cuisine. Babette is every French cook and every French chef, the vital link in the culinary chain that metamorphoses the raw to the cooked and the cooked to the miraculously pleasurable. The fable of French cuisine turns out to be a culinary tale for all times and places, for all those cooks who transform eating into dining, and for all those diners who come away from the table transformed."

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Within the past month, minding my own business, living in middle rural Georgia, 2 local women, they don't know each other, hired me. One of the women found me on Houzz, the other thru her builder.
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Both women, and their spouses, have targeted specialty careers, heavy with international travel. Heavy, for decades. Both women hired me with strong intent. A French garden. Not an American version of French gardens, French.
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Attention to detail inside their homes, not French inspired, French. Neither woman has hesitated to fill a container, while in France thru the years, and ship it home.
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At one of those gardens, before getting out of my service van at the first visit, I knew faux geometry would be used with major hedges, allees, axis. Ironic, much can be manipulated, but the property lines, and roads, cannot. Enter, faux geometry.

Pic, above, here.
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At the front end of faux geometry, especially if you've never heard of it, the concept feels 'wrong'. Faux geometry is not taught in school, nor have I heard it mentioned at any seminar/class/article. Faux geometry was learned, on-the-job. Once learned, it's a sense of magic.

Pic, above, here.
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Collateral to faux geometry is a lecture attended decades ago, Sir Roy Strong, and his wife, came to Atlanta. His garden, The Laskett, has since been bequeathed after he's gone, to live in perpetuity as a public garden. Of course you can guess my cat's name? Laskett. Even Laskett's new vet, moving rural 2 years ago, asked about Laskett's name. And the vet is from Scotland, educated in England.
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At that lecture, all these decades later, I still hear Sir Roy Strong say, "If you have an irregularly spaced area, put a geometric shape in it." Game changing sentence. Faux geometry I had to learn on my own.
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In the renderings, above/below, there are geometric garden rooms, within irregular spaces, and further, faux geometry within several of the geometric garden rooms. Staying with this? Got it?
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Garden Design with pixie dust. A pair of arrows for your quiver.

Pic, above, here.
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Once my pair of 'French' ladies have their gardens installed, I'll match-make them.
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Renderings, above, created by French garden designer, Dominique Lafourcade.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Not my job to tell you how to dig a planting hole, my job is telling you where. More, if you truly want to know how to design your garden, geometry and faux geometry are a pair of major keys to that realm.

Monday, July 24, 2017

Double Axis. A focal point must have a focal point at both ends of its axis..
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Amazing, the things they do not teach you in school.
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Focal point bench, below. Sitting in the bench, you must create a focal point in the opposite direction, bottom.

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Got it?
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Do it.
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Garden & Be Well, XO T
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Pics from Ben Bentreath.
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And most think Garden Design is some sort of voodoo, its practitioners thinking up la-ti-da maybe this/maybe that a bit here a bit there. Nope. Garden Design is pure templated known geography zero recreating the wheel its mechanics laid bare for all the world to see. See. Therein lies the problem. Pure seeing. My best epiphanies about garden design came years after looking, not seeing. The map is not the territory. Gardens that do not satisfy are exactly drawn from the known map. Beautiful gardens expose the territory here, and other realms. Want that? Get you some. Bemused I am about how befuddled I was before seeing the territory, trying to follow the map.
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Best compliment ever, recently. A Canadian client said I was PECULIAR. Ok, thank you. In truth it's peculiar to me, trying to live by the map. Been there done that. Once you hop off the map, into the territory of your life, there is no going back. Why would you? Got it? Do it. Want it? Get it.
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Warning. Not for the faint of heart. Leaving the map, for your territory, is exactly where the ancient mapmakers, before knowing the world was round, foretold at map's edge, Beyond this point there be dragons. Remember the dragon, breathing fire at all who would take his virgin girl. Every scale of his hide a 'Thou shalt not'. That fact is living according to your life's map. Killing that dragon is living in your life's territory. Got that?
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From, In the Field,

"The privelege of a lifetime is being who you are.

---What you have to do, you do with play.

Life is without meaning.You bring the meaning to it.

The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be.

Being alive is the meaning.

---The warrior's approach is to say "yes" to life: "yea" to it all.

Participate joyfully is the sorrows of the world.

We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.

When we talk about settling the world's problems, we're barking up the wrong tree.The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess.We are not going to change it.Our job is to straighten out our own lives.

---We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.If we fix on the old, we get stuck. When we hang onto any form, we are in danger of putrefaction.Hell is life drying up.The Hoarder, the one in us that wants to keep, to hold on, must be killed.If we are hanging onto the form now, we're not going to have the form next.You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.

Destruction before creation.

---Out of perfection nothing can be made.Every process involves breaking something up.The earth must be broken to bring forth life.If the seed does not die, there is no plant.Bread results from the death of wheat.

Life lives on lives.

Our own life lives on the acts of other people.If you are lifeworthy, you can take it.What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure.The world is a match for us.We are a match for the world.

---Opportunities to find deeper powers with ourselves come when life seems most challenging.Negativism to the pain and ferocity of life is negativism to life.We are not there until we can say "yea" to it all.To take a righteous attitude toward anything is to denigrate it.Awe is what moves us forward.As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don't bother to brush it off.Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you.

---Eternity is a dimension of here and now.The divine lives within you.

Live from your own center.

Your real duty is to go away from the community to find your bliss.

The society is the enemy when it imposes its structures on the individual.On the dragon there are many scales. Every one of them says "Thou Shalt."Kill the dragon "Thou Shalt."When one has killed that dragon, one has become The Child.

Breaking out is following your bliss pattern, quitting the old place, starting your hero journey, following your bliss.You throw off yesterday as the snake sheds its skin.

---Follow your bliss.The heroic life is living the individual adventure.

There is no security in following the call to adventure.

Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be.

To refuse the call means stagnation.What you don't experience positively you will experience negatively.

You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path.Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's path. You are not on your own path.If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential.(note: this is what the Holy Grail is all about... not some cup --dv)---The goal of the hero trip down to the jewel point is to find those levels in the psyche that open, open, open, and finally open to the mystery of your Self being Buddha consciousness or the Christ.That's the journey.

It is all about finding that still point in your mind where commitment drops away.

---It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life.Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.THe very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave that was so dreaded has become the center.

You find the jewel, and it draws you off.

In loving the spiritual, you cannot despise the earthly.

The purpose of the journey is compassion.When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion.

The goal is to bring the jewel back to the world, to join the two things together.

---The seperateness apparent in the world is secondary.Beyond that world of opposites is an unseen, but experienced, unity and identity in us all.

Today, the planet is the only proper "in group."

You must return with the bliss and integrate it.

THe return is seeing the radiance everywhere.

Sri Ramakrishna said: "Do not seek illumination unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond."

If you want the whole thing, the gods will give it to you. But you must be ready for it.

---The goal is to live with godlike composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces.

A bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation:"As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm.Jump.It is not as wide as you think."

Ep. 4: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth — ‘Sacrifice and Bliss’

In the fourth episode of The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers and mythologist Joseph Campbell discuss the role of sacrifice in myth — including a mother’s sacrifice for her child — and the need for all of us to find our sacred places in the midst of today’s fast-paced world. In this clip, the two discuss where heroism can be witnessed in modern society.